Thursday, 23 August 2012

How a simple colour shade can make the world of difference when selling on eBay

When running an eBay store, to give customers the best chance to find your products, it is important that you do the little things right.

For example, if you run a fashion or clothing store, the colour of each item is going to be very important to each customer as they have their own personal tastes in terms of the products they are looking for. When you list your products on eBay, you are asked to select what is the main colour for your item. While this may seem straightforward, you need to make sure you select the plural option for your specific colour.

eBay's current search settings allow customers to filter products based on the colour they are looking for. However, when listing a product on your online store, if for example, the colour of the product you're listing is a specific shade of blue, you don't simply want to select that specific shade of blue (e.g. Royal Blue) as your main colour. If you do this then when a customer searches for clothing items, your product will only show in search results where they have specifically typed in royal blue. This seriously limits the number of search results that your product will be seen in.

To remedy this problem you need to select the plural of each colour(e.g. blues) as your main colour. This means that no matter what shade of blue the customer searches for, your item will come up in those search results if the item matches some of the other search parameters.

When listing your items, it is important to take care with the small details as it is often these details which are going to determine how many customers your product is actually seen by.

However, the ability to have your product seen in search results can come at a price. For example, if someone is searching for an item that is navy blue and your item is shown within these search results, a customer may complain that the product they received is a different shade of blue than they originally searched for. To limit this problem you should state the specific colour shade both in the product title and the description. This way they will be as informed as they could be before purchasing the product, no matter what shade of blue they originally searched for.

Due to the problems some eBay sellers are finding with the colour listing feature, eBay are currently looking to alter the layout of the colour settings and are asking sellers for their opinion via their forums.